Instagram officially part of Facebook now

Social networking site Facebook has finally closed its deal with photo sharing website Instagram. The deal was meant to have been closed in the second quarter of this year, but was delayed till the end of August after it received the approval from US regulators. The deal which was for $300 million and 23 million shares of Facebook was finally closed on August 31, at which point the Facebook's share price was $18.06 putting the value at $715.38 million. Had the deal closed in April itself, the Instagram's founders would have made $1 billion.

The Instagram team will now move to the Facebook's offices. The photo sharing app recently celebrated its 5 billionth photo shared. Despite the acquisition, the business would run as usual said Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer. In a statement, he said, "Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can't wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience,"

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom said, "Very excited to announce that we're now officially joining the Facebook family. I'm psyched for the next chapter of this long journey."

Instagram was launched in 2010 and currently has more than 50 million users with half of world's top brands using it.